Excuse Michael Gerson While He Whips This Out

Michael Gerson made his bones by strategically placing verbs and things in the sentences for the least literate president in the history of the Republic. Famously, Gerson was the Christian conscience of the administration that brought the United States over to the side of nations that torture and that wage aggressive wars. Yes, dear friends, Michael Gerson was the gospel bobo of the waterboard. Naturally, this all qualified him for a post-ventriloquism career on the op-ed pages of The Washington Post, under the command of Fred Hiatt, whose skill in personnel matters rivals that of the 1962 New York Mets. It seems now that Gerson has examined his deeply Christian conscience and has come out on the other side as a brawny spokesman for the Why Do They Laugh At My Mighty Sword? position on Syria.

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First, we should have been backing the Free Syrian Army all along, because they are the good-guy moderates, and Republican thinkers historically have been terrific at identifying good-guy moderates in the Middle East, like Ahmad Chalabi, and those guys in Iran that Bob MacFarlane went to see with the Bible and the cake.

Especially during a war, policy pronouncements can cause a ripple of unintended effects. In this case, an unfulfilled pledge has disillusioned our natural ally within Syria, the Free Syrian Army, and weakened it in competition with jihadist groups.

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Yes, because in the Middle East created by the gossoons and general fk-ups with whom Gerson used to work in the administration of former president C-Plus Augustus, the endorsement and support of the United States is just the ticketfor any group resisting jihadist elements in its midst. And anyway, the president should have been killing people, or arranging to kill people, in Syria years ago, because then the Republicans in the Congress would have been on his side.

Obama is inviting members of Congress to share responsibility for a Syrian policy that has achieved little to justify their confidence. In fact, he has undermined political support for the legislative outcome he seeks. For more than five years, Obama has argued that America is overcommitted in the Middle East and should refocus on domestic priorities. Now he asks other politicians to incur risks by endorsing an approach he has clearly resisted at every stage. Obama attempts to rally the nation around a reluctant exception to his ambivalence. And this exception - a calibrated punishment for the use of chemical weapons - seems more of a gesture than a strategy.

These are the words of a man who never will have to worry whether or not a Tomahawk is out there with his name on it. How many people die in a "gesture"? Ten? Fifty? A couple hundred?

Members of Congress have been provided an array of excuses to vote against the authorization of force. And still it would be an act more feckless than anything the president has done. The formal request for legislative support has transformed a policy debate into a determination of institutional responsibilities. Legislators are not arguing between preferred policy options, as they would on issues such as health care or welfare. They are deciding if they will send the chief executive into the world with his hands tied behind his back. This would be more than the repudiation of the current president; it would be the dangerous weakening of the presidency.

Dear Jesus, this again. The constitutional order makes us weak. Only John Yoo makes us strong. If you now have a mental image of Gerson's weeping over a picture of Paul Wolfowitz in a heart-shaped frame, you are not alone.

This does not, of course, amount to blanket permission for self-destructive military actions such as attacking China or surrendering to Monaco.

Oh, why the fk not? Personally, I'd rather cover Congress in Monte Carlo than in Washington.

(The China bit does remind me of a moment early in the career of President Stupid, when he went hat-in-hand to the butchers of Tiananmen Square because they'd detained the crew of one of our spy planes. Somehow, this truckling didn't "weaken" President Stupid's hand when it came to launching idiotic wars of choice based on cooked intelligence.)

But the course Obama contemplates does not fall into such a category. What has been dismissed as"therapeutic bombing" would actually be a military response to the violation of an important international norm. Not every gesture is an empty gesture. And even if this military action were wrong or pointless, it would have to be sufficiently dangerous to justify the gelding of the executive branch on a global stage.

Gelding? Really? Are we making things that plain now?And there you have it. We are going to kill people in Syria out of pure imperial dick-waving. These people will have fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, and fifth-cousins-once-removed, and every one of those people will hate us until the day we die, and they will teach their children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, and fifth-cousins-once-removed to hate us, too, forever. This is not "therapeutic." This is Vietnam, 1962. And to set such things in motion just to prove we still have sufficient national penis to do it is the dumbest reason for making war since the last one devised by anyone who worked for George W. Bush, the ungelded fool.